Tag Archives: Motorized

Builder HallBricks blends the functional with the beautiful in this Technic Motorized Bus. I watched this video several times in awe of its clean lines, compact design, and marvelous engineering. This model exhibits many design features that blend SYSTEM brick and Technic parts to form elegant curves. The rear pillars and roof combine Technic panels with SYSTEM rounded slopes for a smooth, semi-oblate shape. On the outside, the model’s headlights and tail lights consist of multiple translucent tiles for a multi-faceted effect.

Jason and Kristal from JK Brickworks have a knack for making LEGO builds come alive with movement. To celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday recently, they’ve built the Canadian goose! The mother goose is a remote-controlled motorized build with a string to pull along her little goslings. The result is a very realistic family creating havoc at your command!

I don’t want to spoil all the fun in how it’s all put together, but you certainly do want to watch the video feature.

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Most of us remember Tonka trucks and diggers from when we were kids, but Beat Felberhas done one better and created his very own heavy duty yellow construction toy out of LEGO. The Marathon LeTourneau L-1200 LeTro-Loader is built at a scale of 1:28.5 and has all the functions of the original, including all-wheel drive, articulated steering, pneumatic lift arm and bucket and more! The sheer size of this monster is amazing.

Beat has also created the Euclid R-170 Mining Truck at the same scale. The action shot of the siblings with lights on looks fantastic. They just may be the envy of every LEGO Tonka enthusiast.

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Berthil van Beek loves making some of the coolest LEGO machines around. Just a few week ago we highlighted his awesome LEGO ball maze that accelerates balls to 1,000 rpm, and he’s already back having spent more than 100 hours designing another breathtaking creation. This time, it’s an undulating wave of LEGO colors featuring 38 distinct swatches from LEGO’s palette (a palette that’s changing over the years).

Like Berthil’s ball maze, this mechanism is designed to fit with the Great Ball Contraption standard, fitting end-to-end with other fans’ creations for continual movement of LEGO’s tiny soccer balls and basketballs. Berthill tells us he was inspired to create the rainbow wave machine after seeing the vibrant rainbow of colors in the official image of LEGO’s Creator XXXL Box, which he also used a source for many of the colored bricks.

The Rainbow Wave Great Ball Contraption uses about 1,150 pieces and is powered by a single motor, with each of the colored pistons sitting on an 8-tooth gear. Each piston’s gear is exactly 1 tooth offset from its neighbors, and this means the balls travel in a perfectly level line as they move across the waving surface. Berthil says this mechanism took a lot of testing and redesigning to perfect, in particular because digital prototyping with LEGO rendering programs isn’t feasible for complicated moving machinery.

But that’s only half the build. Jason has come up with a fiendishly clever solution to the problem of integrating self-driving vehicles into Lego displays. While others have used magnets for this type of implementation, his solution is the most subtle and straightforward I’ve seen. I’m very much looking forward to seeing this put into practice.